


Diane...

by neckwear



Category: Twin Peaks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-25
Updated: 2015-03-25
Packaged: 2018-03-19 12:10:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3609597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neckwear/pseuds/neckwear
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dale gets a tape recorder on his tenth birthday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Diane...

**Author's Note:**

> this is a fic for the lovely katyfaise, who texted me out of the blue with this idea 
> 
> this is my first twin peaks fic. oops.

On Dale's tenth birthday, he's given one gift. 

His family wasn't particularly well off, but he was used to it. One year, he didn't even get presents. That was when his sister had moved out and his mother and father didn't have her money from working at the convenient store to help chip in. His mother was a teacher and his father didn't have a job, he was always laid up at home sick (Dale didn't know that it was life threatening until he died when he was fifteen). 

But this...this was something that a ten year old would never have asked for for his birthday.

“It's a tape recorder,” his sister, Diane, tells him. “Since I've moved out and we can't talk as much, you can use this to talk about your day. Even the silly things.”

Dale nods—he wasn't a very talkative child. “Thank you,” he says, and gives her the polite and obligatory kiss on the cheek.

“I know it's not a toy car or an action figure, but I think it'll go a longer way for you,” she says. Diane bites her lip, like she does when she's hesitating to say something. “I worry that you bottle it all up. It'll be good to let things out sometimes. Now, let's go have cake.”

Dale was closer to his sister than anyone else in his family. She was always the one who was readily available, anyways. His mother always worked and his father always slept, for as long as he could remember. And his sister treated him like a baby for the longest time—she was ten years older than him, and it made her maternal, protecting him whenever she could and raising him when their mother didn't have the time to. 

So, as a consequence, he got lonely when she wasn't at home. And he kept to himself at school, because he never felt normal around other kids, just Diane. He had a lot of imaginary friends, and she listened when he told her about all of them. She never judged him—just nodded and asked questions when she needed to, like a good big sister. 

Dale doesn't think much of a tape recorder, but he places it on his shelf later that night before he goes to bed, right next to the coffee cup Diane brought back for him when she visited Washington, D.C. on her senior trip.  
\- - -   
Diane was a reporter who always got too involved in cases.

She wasn't afraid to go find out what she needed to report to her audience later on the five o' clock news. She wasn't afraid of adventure, or going the extra mile. It was admirable. Dale wanted to do something like she did. He wanted to help the world like she did, even if it wasn't in the same way. 

But one night, when he's twelve, the story goes too far, and Diane doesn't call Dale before bed like she usually does. 

Dale ventures into the kitchen later that night and finds his mother crying, her head bowed over the island, and he's not sure what's going on.

“Mom...?” he starts, staying near the wall and not getting close to her. She looks over at him, his black doe eyes wide and she tries to stop her sobbing, but a choked bawl comes out of her mouth.

“Oh, honey...” she sighs, and moves over to him, pulling him into her arms and bringing his head close to her, and Dale can feel the heaving in her chest as she cries. “It's Diane.”

“What happened?”

His mother lets another soft cry come out of her mouth before she says “She's dead, Dale, she's dead...oh, God...”

Dale looks up at her. “What?”

“She was killed, she went to far in a case and got shot, I don't know by who, we don't know yet...”

Dale steps back from his mother, his eyes still fixed on her red, puffy cheeks, her hands covering her face and she turns away from him and starts to bawl. His head spins. Nothing seems real. His sister can't be dead, no, he just walked into a bad dream is all, it can't be true...

He rushes from the kitchen to his room and sits on the side of his bed for what seems like hours, listening to the rhythmic snoring from his father and the uneven sobbing of his mother slipping through the door. He clenches the crisp white sheets on his bed in his fists, until his knuckles whiten, and he feels like he isn't reacting like he should. He isn't crying, or throwing things, or yelling at God that it should have been him instead. No, he's calm, calm as can be, and it feels wrong.

He stands up and paces around his room, almost too tired to throw himself on the floor and start bawling right there. He almost hits his head on the shelf above the foot of his bed, and he looks up and sees the dusty tape recorder.

Dale grabs the recorder and takes it off the shelf, and starts to dig around in his room for a cassette to put in. Once he finds one, he places it in the recorder and presses play. He watches the rings on the cassette go around for a minute, somewhat calming him, and he sighs before he starts to talk.

“Diane, I don't know what to do.”  
\- - -   
Nineteen years later, when he's arrived in Twin Peaks, he brings along the recorder to document his time there. He doesn't expect to get attached to a local, but he does. 

The hotel owner's wife, Audrey Horne, was a curious girl with dreamlike tendencies. She looked as if she came out of a fifties magazine, like the picture of his mother holding him and his sister standing by and smiling that always stood on the bookcase in the living room. There was something that attracted him to her, and it only took him a kidnapping later to figure out why—she reminded him of Diane. 

Both of them were tenacious, curious, beautiful. Dale was charmed by her presence, by her ability to make normal, everyday things important and interesting, just like Diane did. Perhaps that was why he was afraid to get any closer to her than he already was, because of Caroline and because of Diane. 

He rescued Audrey once, and he didn't want to have to do it again, because he might not be as lucky.

There was no denying that he cared for her, though. Dale had spent years keeping himself away from people he could easily lose, but there was something that he couldn't resist with Audrey. It was obvious that she was in some sort of in love with him, too, like he was a knight in shining armor and she was a princess, waiting for him to come and make something interesting of her life. Living in the same old small town was surely a bore, Dale thinks, and she was a girl who got what she wanted, and she wanted him.

He closes himself off, tells himself that it'll be better for the both of them, but Diane's voice rings clear in his head. She tells him that he needs to do this, that he hasn't been truly happy in years, and this would be a chance for him to spread his wings. He can't put on a facade forever.

He ignores her. Her voice becomes muffled with the voices of other men, tall men who speak cryptically and small men talking in broken words, and the death of Laura Palmer becomes more important to him than going after an eighteen year old girl when he was thirty-one. 

Dale still talks to Diane about her, though. About conversations they've had, how he feels about her. He tells her that he reminds Diane of herself. 

“Diane,” he starts, “It was nineteen years to the day you died when I rescued her from One Eyed Jack's. Something made me feel like I was lucky to have a chance to save her. I couldn't save you, or Laura Palmer, but I could save her.” 

Dale takes his finger off the play button, and sighs before he places it on the side table next to his bed.   
\- - -  
The night that he tells Audrey he's leaving after the case has been solved, he records a new tape to Diane. 

“Diane...it hurt for me to tell her goodbye. I think I love her.”

That's all he says before he signs off.


End file.
